Robert M. Pirsig
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| Robert M. Pirsig | |
|---|---|
 Pirsig, July 7, 2005 |
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| Born | Robert Maynard Pirsig September 6, 1928 Minneapolis, Minnesota |
| Occupation | Writer, philosopher |
| Nationality | American |
| Genres | Philosophical fiction |
| Notable work(s) | Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (1974) |
| Spouse(s) | Nancy Ann James (1954–1978) Wendy Kimball (m. 1978) |
| Children | Chris, Theodore, Nell |
Robert Maynard Pirsig (born September 6, 1928, Minneapolis, Minnesota) is an American writer and philosopher, mainly known as the author of the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values (1974), which has sold over five million copies around the world.
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[edit] Background
Pirsig was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota to Maynard E. Pirsig and Harriet Marie Sjobeck, and is of German and Swedish descent.[1] His father, Maynard Pirsig, was a University of Minnesota Law School graduate, who began teaching at the University of Minnesota Law School in 1934. The elder Pirsig served as dean of the college of law from 1948 to 1955, before retiring from there in 1970. He later became a professor at the William Mitchell College of Law, where he remained until his final retirement in 1993.[2]
Because he was a precocious child, with an I.Q. of 170 at age 9, Robert Pirsig skipped several grades[1] and was enrolled at Blake School. In 1943, Pirsig entered the University of Minnesota to study biochemistry. In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he described himself as being far from a typical student. He was an idealist of a sort, interested in science as a goal in itself, rather than as a way to establish a career.
While doing biochemical lab work, Pirsig was greatly bothered by the fact that there was always more than one workable hypothesis to explain a given phenomenon, and that the number of such hypotheses seemed almost unlimited. He could not think of any way around this, and to him it seemed that the whole scientific endeavor had been brought to a halt, in some sense. This question so distracted him that he was dismissed from the university for failing grades.
In 1946, Pirsig enlisted in the Army, and served in Korea until he was discharged in 1948.
Upon being discharged, he returned to the United States and briefly settled in Seattle, Washington, before he returned to the University of Minnesota and completed his B.A. in philosophy in 1950. He then attended Banaras Hindu University in India to learn about Eastern Philosophy. He also did graduate work in philosophy and journalism at the University of Chicago, but did not obtain a degree. His difficult experiences as a student in a course taught by Richard McKeon were later described, thinly disguised, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.[3] In 1958, he became a professor at Montana State University in Bozeman, where he taught creative writing courses for two years.
After suffering a nervous breakdown, Pirsig spent time in and out of mental hospitals from 1961 – 1963. After undergoing a psychiatric evaluation, he was diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and clinical depression, and was treated with shock therapy. Pirsig had made a progressive recovery and had discontinued psychotherapy in 1964. He later began working as a freelance writer.
In years following the publication of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, he has lived a solitary and reclusive lifestyle, much like writer J. D. Salinger. Pirsig has travelled around the Atlantic by boat, and has resided in Norway, Sweden, Belgium, Ireland, England, and in various places around the United States since 1980.
[edit] Personal life
Robert Pirsig married Nancy Ann James on May 10, 1954. They had two sons – Chris (1956) and Theodore (1958). After Pirsig was first hospitalized in 1961, James filed for divorce, which was finalized in 1978. Shortly after, he married Wendy Kimball on December 31, 1978.
In 1979, Pirsig's son Chris — who figured prominently in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance — was stabbed to death during a mugging outside the San Francisco Zen Center. Pirsig discusses this incident in an afterword to subsequent editions of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, writing that he and his second spouse, Kimball, decided not to abort the child she conceived in 1980, because he had come to believe that this unborn child was a continuation of the life pattern that Chris had occupied. This child's name is Nell, and she is Pirsig's daughter.
[edit] Published material
Pirsig's work consists almost entirely of two novels. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance sets out Pirsig's interpretation of "Quality" and "the Good." It is mostly a first person narrative based on a motorcycle trip he and his young son Chris took from Minneapolis to San Francisco.[4]
Pirsig's publisher's recommendation to his Board ended with "This book is brilliant beyond belief, it is probably a work of genius, and will, I'll wager, attain classic stature." Pirsig noted in an early interview, that Zen was rejected 121 times before being accepted by William Morrow Publishers. In his book review, George Steiner compared Pirsig's writing to Dostoevsky, Broch, Proust, and Bergson, stating that "the assertion itself is valid... the analogies with Moby-Dick are patent".[5] The Times Literary Supplement called it "Profoundly important, Disturbing, Deeply moving, Full of insights, A wonderful book".
In 1974, Pirsig was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship to allow him to write a follow-up, Lila: An Inquiry into Morals (1991), in which he elaborates and focuses on a value-based metaphysics, called Metaphysics of Quality, to replace the subject-object view of reality.
[edit] See also
- American philosophy
- List of American philosophers
- The Timeless Way of Building for a similar and contemporaneous approach to Quality.
[edit] Notes
- ^ a b "Robert M. Pirsig". It Happened in History. American Society of Authors and Writers. http://amsaw.org/amsaw-ithappenedinhistory-090604-pirsig.html. Retrieved 2008-02-25.
- ^ A Tribute to Dean Pirsig, University of Minnesota Law School, republished by MOQ.org.
- ^ The story is recounted in Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (New York: Bantam Books, 1974, pp. 329-330). Richard McKeon can be identified from the context.
- ^ The New Yorker, 22 June 2009, pp. 83-86.
- ^ George Steiner, Uneasy Rider The New Yorker, 15 April 1974, pp. 147-150.
[edit] External links
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Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to: Robert M. Pirsig |
- Pirsig bio from the American Society of Authors and Writers.
- Metaphysics of Quality page.
- robertpirsig.org via Internet Archive Papers focusing on Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality.
- Photographs from Pirsig's 1968 trip upon which Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is based
- Timeline of Pirsig's life.
- Zen And Now - Mark Richardson's book contains more Pirsig biographical detail.
- Proceedings via Internet Archive of 2005 MOQ Conference at the University of Liverpool, devoted to Pirsig's work.
- Robert M. Pirsig & Quality
- ZAMM Travel Route.
- NPR interviews with Pirsig: Audio: 1974 and Audio: 1992.
- Observer Interview (UK), 19 November 2006
- Audio excerpt from BBC radio program about cult books.
